Isidore of Pelusium

Isidore was born in Egypt, most likely at Alexandria, in the second half of the fourth century. He was educated in rhetoric, which shows on every page he left. Later writers claimed he was a kinsman of the patriarchs Theophilus and Cyril of Alexandria; the claim comes from centuries afterward and cannot be checked.

What is certain is where he ended up. He gave up the city, took monastic vows, and settled on a mountain near Pelusium, a port town at the eastern edge of the Nile delta, close to the road that ran into Palestine. He seems to have served as a priest there and for a time led the community. He died around 450.

He is remembered for his mail. Roughly two thousand of his letters survive, gathered into five books; ancient catalogues speak of about three thousand. They are short, often four or five sentences, sometimes a single paragraph, and they go to everybody. Bishops, monks, imperial officials, soldiers, tradesmen, students, a governor he thought was taking bribes, a priest he thought was selling ordinations.

Most of them answer a question about the Bible. Someone writes asking what a phrase in Paul means, or why two Gospel accounts differ, or how to read a hard line in the Psalms, and Isidore answers plainly and stops. He preferred the straightforward historical sense of a passage and used allegory sparingly, which put him closer to the teachers of Antioch than to the Alexandrian school he was trained in.

He admired John Chrysostom above all living preachers and never forgave Theophilus of Alexandria for driving him into exile. When Cyril of Alexandria went to the Council of Ephesus in 431, Isidore wrote to him, his own patriarch, and possibly his relative, warning him not to let private grievance dress itself up as zeal for the faith, and reminding him that many people thought he was fighting an old family feud rather than a heresy. It is one of the plainest letters any churchman of that century received.

He wrote the same way to officials. He told them what corruption was doing to the poor of Pelusium, named names, and kept writing when it made him enemies. Nothing suggests he ever held office, wrote a treatise, or attended a council. He answered his mail for perhaps forty years, and that turned out to be a body of work: a running commentary on Scripture and on ordinary Christian conduct, written one question at a time.

Sources: Isidore of Pelusium, Letters (five books, in Migne's Patrologia Graeca 78); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia; Nicephorus Callistus, Ecclesiastical History (for the later traditions about his family).